Sunday, June 18, 2017

How Much Are People Making from the Sharing Economy?

From Priceonomics:

Coined shortly after the financial crisis
in 2009, the so-called “gig economy” or “sharing economy” refers to the
growing cadre of companies like Airbnb, Lyft, and TaskRabbit—platforms
that employ temporary workers who provide a wide variety of services:
delivery, ridesharing, rentals, and odd jobs. A recent Pew study estimated that nearly a quarter of all Americans earn some money through these platforms.

But how much money are the service providers in the sharing economy actually making from their "side-gigs"?

We analyzed anonymized data from Priceonomics customer Earnest,
a loan provider, and examined tens of thousands of loan applicants to
see how much people are earning on side-gig platforms and how these
platforms stack up against each other.

We
looked at a span of data accounting for just over two years, and for
each worker, we analyzed a pay period of between one and 27 months. We
do not know how many hours of work the income represents for each
platform, as each one has a unique pricing and commission structure.

Furthermore,
this data is just reflective of the Earnest user base, who are
typically refinancing college loans and therefore may be more likely to
be treating these services as a “side-gig” than the typical service
provider who may be more likely to treat it as a fulltime job and have
different earning levels.

We
found that 85% of side-gig workers make less than $500 a month. And of
all the side-gig platforms we examined, Airbnb hosts earn the most by
far.

***

In
our data, on all but Lyft and Uber, we excluded any worker who made a
total $10 or less from a platform to eliminate data points that could
simply represent a refund from the company. For Lyft and Uber, we
excluded anyone with a total income of $50 or less. Then we tallied the
average monthly incomes made by workers at each company.

Making
an average of $924 off their platform each month, Airbnb hosts make
nearly three times as much as other workers. Workers at the general
task-service platform, TaskRabbit, rank second at $380 per month.
Overall, Lyft and Uber drivers make roughly the same average per month
at $377 and $364 respectively. We also observed that nearly a quarter of
Lyft drivers also earned income from Uber—and of that subset, we saw
that the average income was actually higher for Uber ($481 vs $396.)...